A whistleblowing employee of a Huawei subsidiary is suing the biz for $100m over claims the Chinese networking kit maker infiltrated meetings at Facebook HQ in the US – and stole rivals' trade secrets before sending them to China.

Jesse Hong alleged, in court documents, that Huawei and subsidiary Futurewei Technologies ordered him and two other staffers to "register using fake US company names" to gain entry to meetings at the Telecom Infra Project's 2017 annual shindig.

Facebook - Conference - HQ - Menlo - Park

Facebook, which was hosting the conference at its HQ in Menlo Park, California, had banned Huawei from attending private meetings it had organised with other companies, including US startup competitors of Huawei's.

When Hong, a principal architect at Futurewei, refused to register for those meetings under a fake company name – something he saw as "illegal and fraudulent" – he alleged that his manager, Shiao Yang Chen, went ahead, along with a co-worker named in court documents only as "Sam", and sneaked into the meetings anyway.

Information - Huawei - TIP - Summit - Report

The information that the two gathered was said to have been put into a Huawei "TIP Summit" report which was transferred "to product teams in China". The information included competitors' integration plans as well as information "Sam" allegedly gathered by doing consulting work for IOpipe, CloudGenix and Galactic Fog.

In November 2017, immediately before the summit, Hong had reported his boss to Huawei...